ROGUE WARRIOR®

by Richard Marcinko

  He spun the wheel again, shifting us more into the middle of the channel. He cut the throttle so we were moving steadily but very slowly. He reached under his flak jacket, pulled a Lucky out of his chambray shirt pocket, tamped it on the back of his watch, lit it, sucked deeply, then exhaled through his nose.

  “You’re a pus-nuts fucking smart-ass—sir.”

  “That’s what they used to tell me in the teams.”

  A quizzical wrinkle of eyebrow. “You from the teams?”

  “UDT-21 and 22. Five years.”

  “Where’d you do your cruises?”

  I stuck my thumb back toward Tre Noc. “Last two were with ol’ B. B. Witham himself in the Med—aboard the Rushmore.”

  “The 114? No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  He turned his attention to the river, throttling down so that the boat barely moved against the current. Like hovering a chopper, it is a piloting move that takes training and experience. He pointed starboard. “There’s a sandbar there. You’ll want to watch it when you take your boats out.”

  “Roger, Chief.”

  “Cigarette?”

  I shook my head.

  “You ever do time in Naples?”

  “Shit, Chief, every friggin’ cruise. And before that I did a year there—worked as a radioman 1960-61.”

  “What was your rating?”

  “In Naples? E-3, Chief—a ‘designated striker.’”

  He took a drag and exhaled a perfect smoke ring that hung in the humid air for what seemed an eternity. “I always liked fuckin’ Naples. I did five years in Naples—’55 to ’60. I got fat eating pasta and I got fuckin’ laid a lot—I lived with a fuckin’ bella ragazza—and I messed with the fuckin’ officers. It was a great fuckin’ tour.”

  “The ugliest fucking female officer I ever knew ran the motherfucking commo center in blanking Naples in 1960 and ’61.”

  “I heard about her. Two-hundred-fuckin’-pounder.”

  “I used to call her Big FUC—Big Female Ugly Commander.”

  He half-cracked a smile but restrained himself from going any farther. “No shit.” He looked me over, up and down, just like Ev Barrett used to. He took another drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then flicked it—a perfect parabolic arc into the Bassac. He watched it hiss then disappear in the brown water. “What the fuck you say your name was, son?”

  I smiled the smile of the newly blessed. “Marcinko, Chief. Marcinko. But call me Rick.”

  Officers seldom listen to enlisted men enough. I do. I’ve made a habit of it. And I’ve learned a lot. From my newfound sea-daddy chief on the PBR, for example, I learned that Charlie had the habit of keying his ops to our PBR patrols. The officers at 116 had formatted the war. Operations were done by the book: constant and consistent. The result, the chief said, was that Charlie knew exactly how we operated.

  What Charlie’d do is wait for a PBR to come by. Then he’d send a decoy—maybe a civilian, maybe a volunteer—across the river in a sampan or a raft. If the poor schnook got shot or captured, well, too bad. But Charlie had also surmised that, according to our official U.S. Navy method of operations, once an action was initiated, accomplished, and terminated, it was over—and the PBR would move on. After it chugged out of sight, the VC would mobilize their main supply convoys or troops or whatever and move across the river.

  Decoy ruses work best if you can set your clocks by the enemy’s operations, and the VC had been able to set theirs by the U.S. Navy. I was determined to change all that.

  First, I had to see what kind of firepower I could assemble. About thirteen kilometers west of Tre Noc was a place called Juliet Crossing, which was a hotbed of VC activity. Just downriver from Juliet was a small island—maybe three hundred meters by one hundred meters. It was a free-fire zone: there were no friendlies anywhere on it.

  The night after I’d taken the PBR cruise I took Bravo Squad and loaded up a pair of STABs—Seal Tactical Assault Boats. STABs are fiberglass jobs with dual 110-horsepower Mercury outboard engines. That’s fast. Amidships, there’s a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod. The forward gunwales have pintles for port and starboard M60 machine guns. We also carried shoulder-fired 57mm and 90mm recoilless rifles that fired both high-explosive and “beehive” rounds, which were filled with pellets and caused a lot of trauma if they hit someone.

  We stowed enough ammo to sink the STABs by half a foot, then at about 1830 we went on a little pleasure cruise to Juliet Crossing. Patches Watson took the wheel of STAB One, and Bob Gallagher ran STAB Two about one hundred yards to my port flank.

  We’d almost reached Juliet when Gallagher called me on the radio. “Mr. Rick?”

  “Roger, Eagle.”

  “Look at the fish jumping behind us.”

  I looked behind me. Sure enough, there was a school of small, phosphorescent fish breaking the calm, dark surface of the river. I looked again. “Shit, Eagle, those aren’t fish—it’s fucking automatic weapons fire.”

  I slapped Patches on the shoulder. “Bring her around.” I watched as the bullets followed us, plink-plink-plink. We couldn’t hear anything because of the noise generated by our Mercs. But Charlie was sure as shit shooting at us, and the firing had to be coming from the free-fire island.

  We watched, transfixed, as bullets hit the water. Next to me stood a SEAL named Harry Mattingly, who’d come along for the ride. All of a sudden he screamed, “Oh, shit—I’ve been hit.”

  I knocked him to the deck and looked. A ricochet had spun off the water and got him right between the eyes. He was bleeding like hell. But he was also okay—the wound was only superficial. His face had been less than a foot from mine—this shit was for real.

  “You’re one lucky son of a bitch,” I said. “Get up and shoot back at ’em.”

  Patches spun the wheel, Gallagher followed, and both STABs headed for the far side of the river. I grabbed the radio mike. “I’ll follow you in. When he starts firing at you, I’ll spot the muzzle flashes and hit him with the recoilless. Then it’ll be your turn.”

  For two hours we raked the island with everything we had, alternating Eagle’s STAB and mine as we charged in, expended ammo, and veered away. From the pitiful amount of fire being returned, I guessed there were no more than one or two VC out there. But numbers didn’t matter. What was important was that they’d shot at us, and we were returning fire.

  At about twenty hundred I decided to call in aerial support. I got on the radio and requested Spooky, the call sign for a Puff the Magic Dragon—a C-47 equipped with four Vulcan Gatling guns that can each fire 6,300 rounds a minute.

  “No can do without PROCOM—Vietnamese Provincial Commander—authorization, Silver Bullet,” said the Air Force voice on the radio.

  Silver Bullet was me—it was the most grandiose radio “handle” I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Authorization? No prob. I simply got the PROCOM out of bed and asked for fire support, “I got a hot one here, sir.”

  “Who are you?”

  I told him.

  He groaned audibly. “You American assholes are always making trouble.” But he authorized my Spooky.

  We watched as the plane floated one hundred meters above the island at about ninety knots. Even in the darkness we could see trees, bushes, and earth flying as the Vulcans raked the ground. Spooky made five slow, lethal passes and then wagged his wings, banked, and flew northward. I got him on the radio. “Thanks, guys. Silver Bullet over and out.”

  I called Gallagher. “Not bad, huh?”

  “Right on—Ensign Silver Bullet.” I could hear Eagle guffaw over the speaker. “Why didn’t you just call yourself Hot Cock?”

  “I would have if I’d thought of it.” I swung my STAB to port. “Let’s go home.”

  We’d had four hours of fun, and it was 2230 by now, high time for a few cold ones. “It’s Miller time,” I radioed Gallagher. We wheelied the STABs and hauled ass downriver like a goddamn twentieth-century armada. I couldn’t stop smiling.
We’d shot off every frigging bullet we’d carried with us, and we stunk of cordite and sweat. We smelled like the warriors we’d always wanted to be. War was great!

  The natural high lasted until we reached dockside. I saw him from the river, some yahoo asshole jumping up and down like a monkey on a leash, his mouth working in four-quarter time.

  As we got closer, I picked him out. It was the OPS boss, a lieutenant commander named Hank Mustin. Now, I didn’t really know Mustin except by reputation. He was an Academy grad whose daddy and granddaddy were both admirals, all of which just impressed the shit out of little old arrogant me, right?

  By the time we were within twenty yards I could hear him shouting over the throaty rumble of our twin Mercs. “Who the fuck are you calling in an air op without my authorization? Who gave you the goddamn authority to get the goddamn PROCOM out of his frigging bed? Who gave you permission to use this friggin’ unit’s call sign?”

  To be honest, I’d never given any of those questions any consideration at all. You waged war, and that was that. You didn’t put your hat in your hand and say, “May I?”

  So I answered him back in kind. “Hey, you asshole, I came here to kick some fucking VC ass and take some fucking VC names—and that’s what I fucking did tonight. And if you don’t fucking like it, then fuck you and all your fucking kind, you sorry shit-for-brains cockbreath pencil-dick numb-nuts asshole.”

  He got absolutely white-faced, screamed, “You are in trouble, mister,” and stomped off. I never gave the incident another thought, until the next afternoon.

  Every day just after noon, Captain B. B. Witham used to lie in a hammock he’d strung alongside his commodore’s hootch, to read, smoke, sip coffee, and work on his tan. The day after our escapade he called me over as I passed by on my way to chow.

  He plucked off the blue baseball cap that covered his thick, closely cropped, gray-blond hair, thumbed his sunglasses onto his forehead, and squinted at me. “Dick, you’re starting.” He reached for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke in my direction. “You’re in trouble already.”

  “Moi?”

  “Oui, toi, mon petit phoc. ”

  What the hell was he babbling? “What did I do?” I really didn’t know.

  Witham traded the cigarette for a mug of coffee, sipped, returned the cup to an ammo-crate table, and picked up his Marlboro again. “Do the words Hank and Mustin mean anything to you?”

  “Ah, so—”

  Witham rubbed his coarse blond mustache in irritation. “Don’t ‘ah so’ me. He could bloody well get you courtmartialed. He’s a senior officer. He’s got juice in Washington. He’s an Academy grad. And he’s not a bad guy—in fact, Ensign Geek, if you got to know him without his wanting to cut your balls off and fly ’em from the frigging flagpole, he could become a real help to you.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “Don’t give me any of your ‘aye-aye’ horse-puckey either, Dick. I’m serious when I say he can help you. Hank writes the ops plans.”

  “So? Big deal.”

  “You are the most arrogant s.o.b. ensign I have ever met.” Witham took a drag of Marlboro. “Read my lips, Dick. He’s the one who’s designed the SEAL deployment out here.”

  “But he ain’t a SEAL, sir. He’s some Academy twit who tells me, ‘When you run into the enemy, you have to ask me, “May I?” before you can fire one goddamn round.’”

  “That’s not what he’s saying.”

  “That’s how I read it.”

  “You go and shoot up a free-fire zone without telling anyone. You get the PROCOM out of bed to give you fire support and authorize it using the 116 Task Force—of which I am the goddamn commodore—call sign. And you’re telling me that Hank Mustin is an asshole because he’s upset? Screw him, Dick—I’m upset.”

  “Well—maybe I got a little steamed last night.”

  “Read my lips. Desist, desist, desist. You go around telling too many lieutenant commanders to go fuck themselves the way you did last night and they’re gonna fly you out of here in shackles.”

  “Okay. I got it. Wilco.”

  Witham shook his head. “Good.” He paused and sipped his coffee. “Fact is, there has to be some sort of order to things around here, Dick.”

  “I agree. But the way it looks to me, Skipper, everyone around here thinks very conventionally. You ride the boats, you listen to the chiefs. From what I hear, Charlie knows what we’re gonna do because we run everything by the book.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s time for a new book—something he hasn’t read yet.”

  Witham shook his head. “We’ve got a new book. And Hank Mustin wrote it—SEALs will support riverine operations, and—”

  “Skipper, we’re the ones who should have written our own plan. He sees SEALs as support units. Screw it, Skipper—Hank Mustin may be a terrific guy, but what he’s designed is conventional, Academy Navy pus-nuts thinking. For chrissakes, Skipper, SEALs’re supposed to be unconventional. That means not by the book.” I waited while he sipped his coffee. “I didn’t come here to sit and wait for Charlie to find me, Skipper. I want to kick Charlie’s ass on his own turf. That’s unconventional.”

  “Like you did last night?”

  “Hey—last night was just a rehearsal. I wanted to give my guys some practice before we went out for real.”

  Witham sighed. “I’ll tell you something, Dick. There’s no practice out here—no rehearsal. Every bloody day is for real. You want to expend four hours’ worth of my ammo, then bring me back a VC prisoner or some intel or something else I can use.”

  He was right. Dammit—he was right.

  His tone softened. “Did you at least get anything out there?”

  “If there was anything on that island, Skipper, it wasn’t moving after we got done. We came home bone-dry. Not a round left—even in the M16s.”

  “Boy, you do like living dangerously.” He shook his head. “Look—stay out of Hank Mustin’s way for a couple of weeks. I’ll smooth things over, and you’ll end up friends. But Jesus—what a way to start.”

  He slid his sunglasses down, replaced the long-visored cap, and picked up his paperback. “Dismissed, Ensign Geek.”

  Chapter 8

  BRAVO SQUAD DIDN’T SEE ANY ACTION FOR ABOUT A WEEK after my little escapade. I was the junior man, and it was decided by the lieutenants that combat patrols would be assigned in order of seniority. Bravo had to wait until last. Finally, after what we considered an interminable lull, we got to go.

  I’d obtained some intel about VC activity at Juliet Crossing, close to the free-fire island where we’d tested our firepower. Now, Bravo would try its luck there again, this time in what I hoped would be a face-to-face confrontation with Mr. Charlie.

  We planned a textbook riverine operation. “Consider this a KISS mission—Keep It Simple, Stupid,” I told my guys. And indeed, the plan was so elementary it could have been designed by Hank Mustin. We’d insert onto the westernmost tip of the free-fire island, which overlooked Juliet Crossing, a major north-south VC transverse point on the Bassac River. There, we’d wait for a VC courier to show himself. We would ambush and kill him, recover whatever intelligence we could, bring it back to Skipper Witham, receive a pat on the head and an “attaboy,” then go find some cold beer and party.

  The killing was an important element for a couple of reasons. First, that’s what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never know whether you can kill someone until you do it. I wanted to make sure that each member of Bravo was up to the task. It could prove deadly to the squad if even one man was reticent. We left Tre Noc just after sundown, all of us in a single STAB. We’d blacked out our faces and hands and wore camouflage greens, jungle boots, soft caps, and web gear, and we carried one canteen, our assault knives, and lots and lots of bullets and grenades.

  We were part of a miniflotilla. One of the SEAL Two lieutenants, Larry Bailey, took command of one Mike boat—an armored Landing Craft, Medium, or LCM—which held an 81-mike-
mike (81mm mortar), plus pairs of M60 and .50caliber machine guns. A second Mike boat was commanded by a SEAL One officer on TAD from Rung Sat Zone. He was a pretty-boy bleach-blond California surfer I’ll call Lt. Adam Henry. I didn’t like him. We were also joined by one of 116’s PBRs, with its machine guns and 40mm Gatling. If we got into trouble, Adam would play John Wayne—he’d shoot the hell out of Charlie, while the STAB would hit the shoreline and extract us in a hurry. Larry’s mission was to sniff and snuff out any VC crossing the river upstream.

  As I think about it now, Larry would have been a better choice for the John Wayne role. A dark, lanky Texas boy with eyes like a cobra’s, he’d been the most aggressive of the lieutenants during our predeployment training. It was a foregone conclusion that Larry would be SEAL Team Two’s tiger in Vietnam.

  The boats drew abreast of our target area. The STAB moved toward the island at six knots while the PBR and both Mike boats continued on a course upriver. Adam should not have gone along. The growls from their heavy engines and the STAB’s Mercs would cover any noise made by our insertion, while the larger boats would also prevent any VC at Juliet Crossing, or serving as lookouts on the riverbank, from seeing us drop off the STAB. We were sixty yards south of the island, and just east of the tip. I tapped Patches Watson. He rolled over the far gunwale and dropped into the warm water. Now Ron Rodger went. Then me, Joe Camp, Jim Finley, and last, Eagle Gallagher.

  The STAB continued upriver, disappearing into the darkness. Faces half out of the water, we dog-paddled slowly toward the island, moving as quietly as we could. Eight yards off the southern bank I dropped my feet down and was immediately sucked into ooze that covered my boots. I kicked free and dog-paddled again until my knees touched the muddy bottom.

  I moved cautiously onto the bank, which was overgrown with vegetation, slid my M16 over my head, and flipped off the safety.

  I waited. The lap of the water was interrupted by the sound of the other SEALs as they arrived one by one. I peered. We were all present and accounted for. I gave hand signals: move up the bank; spread into preassigned positions; set up the perimeter.